Divers resume work at Chelyabinsk meteorite fall site

YEKATERINBURG, March 22, /ITAR-TASS/. Work of divers has resumed on Lake Chebarkul at the Chelyabinsk meteorite fall site.

The operation was suspended last Tuesday because of a strong wind, frost of 15 degrees and silt in the water that made search below the depth of nine meters practically impossible.

Divers worked very intensively last weekend, the director-general of the Aleut service for special works, which had won the tender to raise meteorite fragments, Nikolai Murzin, told Itar-Tass on Saturday.

Divers together with scientists completed mapping of anomalies on the bottom.

This Saturday, divers have begun to examine the bottom with special probes.

Murzin said that this season they were to examine 12 anomalies in two zones of about 300 and 50 sq m.

One of the anomalies indicates there may be a meteorite fragment weighing several tonnes, a scientist at the Geophysics Institute of the Ural branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Arkady Ovcharenko, has told Itar-Tass.

The largest fragment raised last year weighed 570 kilogrammes. It was found near the main anomaly, the scientist said.

The Chelyabinsk meteorite came into Earth's atmosphere on February 15, 2013, at about 07:10 Moscow time, with a powerful explosion in the atmosphere at an altitude of 30-50 km, which was seen by hundreds of thousands of people in the Ural region and northern Kazakhstan. Many fragments fell onto the Chelyabinsk Region. Largest fragments fell in the area of Lake Chebarkul, 78 km west of Chelyabinsk.